All Mammals share the vertebrae also known as a tailbone. The human tailbone is similar to the tail bone of many animals. The tailbone is proof of human evolution. Despite their outwardly differences they have the same form but they have different functions. "Other mammal find their tails useful for balance, but when humans learned to walk, the tail bone in humans became useless and evolution converted it to just some fused vertebrae we call a coccyx"~ Lifscience.com
"The thigh bone's connected to the hip bone 
The hip bone's connected to the backbone
The backbone's connected to the neck bone
Doin' the skeleton dance"
The hip bone's connected to the backbone
The backbone's connected to the neck bone
Doin' the skeleton dance"
Hi, Alma!
ReplyDeleteThis blog was fun to read, and the title had me reciting the song in my head too! It's certainly interesting that even though we don't have full on tails, we still have a tailbone to show what was once present. It's also interesting because humans even have a tail when developing in the womb, which eventually goes away as the fetus grows! It's amazing that a tail can provide other functions for different animals too!
Make sure you read the prompts carefully in the guidelines and respond to each one clearly. You focused on the second section of each part here but didn't address the first and third. You kind of jump right into the discussion of the trait comparisons, but the opening section in both the homologous and analogous areas asked for a description of your species, not just identification of the species or the traits. This would help your reader understand the environment and behavior of the species to better understand why their traits evolved the way they did. Needed to be expanded.
ReplyDeleteHomology: The tailbone is a good example of a homologous trait, but understand that it is a "relative" term... it is homologous *relative to* (for example) the tail in another organism. So you needed to select two organisms and compare their traits. One possibility would have been to compare the human tailbone to the prehensile tail of a spider monkey. Clearly genetically related through the primate line, but also clearly possessing different functions.
One additional caution: The human tailbone isn't useless. It serves as a connection point for muscles important in excretory and urinary functions, as well as serving as the pelvic floor, helping to hold in our internal organs. We would notice if we didn't have it!
Missing the section on ancestry? This is difficult to do without two organisms, as the idea here was to discuss *common* ancestry.
Analogy: All mammalian (and reptilian and amphibian and fish) tails are homologous traits. Now if you had compared the tail of mammal to the tail of an insect of some sort, finding a common function there, then that would have been analogous.
Good images.